Lawrence James - Aristocrats: Power, Grace, and Decadence: Britains Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present

A RISTOCRATS

Also by Lawrence James

Raj: The Making of British India
Imperial Warrior: The Life and Times of
Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby
The Iron Duke: A Military Biography of Wellington
Warrior Race: A History of the British at War
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
The Golden Warrior: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia
The Middle Class: A History

Power, Grace, and Decadence:
Britains Great Ruling Classes
from 1066 to the Present

Lawrence James

St. Martins Press New York

ARISTOCRATS . Copyright 2009 by Lawrence James. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

James, Lawrence, 1943

Aristocrats : power, grace, and decadence : Britains great ruling classes from 1066 to the present / Lawrence James. 1st U.S. ed.

p. cm.

First published in Great Britain by Little, Brown, 2009.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-312-61545-1

1. Aristocracy (Social class)Great BritainHistory. I.Title.

HT653.G7J36 2010

305.5'220941dc22

2010013041

First published in Great Britain by Little, Brown

First U.S. Edition: July 2010

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the memory of Wellesley
a Newfoundland dog

PART ONE
A SCENDANCY: 10661603

PART TWO
E QUILIBRIUM: 16031815

PART THREE
D ECLINE: 1815

First I would like to thank my wife Mary for her encouragement, patience and helpful suggestions. My gratitude also extends to Dr Ian Bradley, Geordie Burnett Stuart, Richard Demarco, the Earl and Countess of Dundee, the Earl of Glasgow, Professor John Haldane, Michael and Veronica Hodges, Edward James, Henry and Ruth James, Viscount Kelburn, Yvonne Mallett, Dr Roy Oliver, Professor and Dr Anna Patterson, Professor Nick Roe, Dr Jane Stabler, Andrew and Sarah Williams, and Percy and Isabel Wood. All have offered suggestions and enlightenment.

I would also like to thank John Forster the archivist at Blenheim Palace and Greg Colley of the Bodleian Library for their assistance, as well as the staff of the British Library, the National Archives, the National Archives of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland and St Andrews University Library. Guidance and support have come from my agent Andrew Lownie, and Steve Guise, Iain Hunt, Tim Whiting and Richard Beswick of Little, Brown for which I am grateful.

Material from the Blenheim Palace archives appears by kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Marlborough.

This is a history of the British aristocracy and their now almost vanished supremacy. It explains how and why a tiny elite exercised such a vast and pervasive influence over the course of our history. Aristocrats created the constitution, made laws and commanded armies and navies. They rearranged the landscape to accord with their notions of beauty and to satisfy their passion for hunting. Their patronage dictated patterns of taste until recent times and aristocratic manners established codes of conduct for the rest of society which remained in place until recently.

The word aristocracy appeared late in our language, arriving via France in the mid-sixteenth century. It was a compound of the Greek aristo (the best) and kratos (government) and defined an Aristotelian notion of the distribution of political power in an ideal state. Aristotles aristocrats were men of learning and wisdom whose wealth gave them the leisure to devote their lives to government and the general welfare of the rest of society. This concept of aristocracy was highly flattering to an already dominant elite, which, since the eleventh century, had been called the baronage, nobility and latterly the peerage. The Aristotelian notion of aristocracy reinforced an already deeply rooted sense of superiority and public responsibility which justified power and privilege.

This new word assisted the long process of collective self hypnosis by which aristocrats convinced themselves that their distinctive qualities made them indispensable to the nation. In 1484 John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln, told Parliament that the nobility represented virtue and ancient riches and was the sheet anchor of the country. The Whig political theorist Edmund Burke said much the same in the 1770s when he praised the upright constitutional conduct and public virtues of the aristocracy. Virtue was genetically transmitted as the Marquess of Curzon assured the House of Lords in 1910. The hereditary principle he insisted had given Britain an upper class which, on the whole, had honourably trained itself in the responsibilities of government. In 1999, when the hereditary peers were about to be expelled from the House of Lords, Lord Hardy, a former trade union leader and Labour life peer, recalled the long history of dedication to the public good of one noble dynasty in his native Yorkshire.

The Aristotelian concept of aristocracy has had a long life and, on the whole, aristocrats have been highly successful in convincing the world that they were qualified to undertake the affairs of state, were supremely useful and that things would somehow fall apart without their guidance. Their conviction and its manifestations comprise the central theme of this book. Aristocrats did not, however, always have everything their own way: from time to time the aristocratic principle has been challenged, sometimes violently. I have, therefore, paused to examine the opinions and actions of those men and women who rejected aristocratic authority as irrational and unjust.

Antipathy to the theory of aristocracy raises the question as to why it was tolerated for so long by so many. One explanation offered in this book is that there were always enough aristocrats who understood that consent to their power ultimately depended on its being used for the public benefit. From the Middle Ages onwards, aristocrats had encouraged the perception of themselves as robust, independent-minded fellows who would take up cudgels to protect the people from overbearing monarchs and elected governments with authoritarian instincts. The House of Lords was like the Home Guard, ready in case of danger, observed Winston Churchill, the grandson of a Duke. Within the last decade, the Lords have opposed legislation designed to overturn ancient legal freedoms in the name of the so-called war against terrorism.

I have argued that the consent of the masses underpinned the ascendancy of the aristocracy and its survival. This consent was almost withdrawn during the Reform Act crisis of 18302 and the row over the reduction of the powers of the House of Lords during 1910 and 1911. Yet there were aristocrats, most notably the first Duke of Wellington, who recognised that compromise was infinitely preferable to extinction. In the final sections of this book, I have tried to show that submission to public opinion and flexibility paid dividends. By shedding some of its powers, the aristocracy discovered that it could thrive and still exert some influence within a democratic and egalitarian society.

I have interwoven the political history of the aristocracy with an exploration of the ways in which its members used their prestige to dictate aesthetics, literature and music. Aristocrats also dominated the world of sport. A thread of hearty muscularity runs through the history of the nobility: aristocrats hunted, bred horses and raced them, and patronised boxers and cricket teams. Sporting mania was surpassed by an urge to gamble, often recklessly.